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bMail Tips and Tricks

The Campus Shared Services knowledge base has many
answers to bMail questions. Try there if you don't find the answer
here, or contact your tech support person.

Note: some of these answers involve enabling Labs. These features are not officially supported and may go away in the future.

How do I...?

Remove the eecs label from the beginning of all of my folder labels

You will only need to follow this procedure for the main folders under eecs (their subfolders will come with them).
Open your Settings menu and select "Labels."
Find a main folder name and click
"edit" at the end of the line. UNcheck the "Nest label under" box.

If you click "remove" instead of "edit" it will remove all labels from all
of the messages in the folder and its subfolders and Archive them. The
same is true if you find the folder name on the left side of your main bMail
window, hover over it until you see the little down arrow, and select "remove
label."

Remove the filter that is sending all of my new mail into my eecs-Inbox.

There will be a filter set up on bMail to forward all of your incoming
@eecs mail to the inbox under your eecs- label.
If you would prefer your @eecs mail to appear in your main Inbox,
open Settings, Filters. Check the box next to the :eecs@
filter and click "delete."

Search for messages:

If you just want to find messages by sender, subject, or contents, enter it in the search box at the top of the page and go. By default, this searches all of your mail. If you choose a label on
the left and then search, it will search messages with that label: you'll see "label:blah" at the start of the search box. For more options, click the little
down arrow at the right side of the search box.

Select more than one page of messages at at a time:

Go to the first page of messages and choose "All" from the 'select'
dropdown (empty checkbox to the left above the table of contents).
A line of text will appear at the top of the message block that
says something like "All 50 conversations on this page are
selected. Select all 402 conversations in 'INBOX'."
The second sentence is a link you can click to select all the
messages on all of the pages. You can also do this when a search
returns more messages or conversations than will fit on one page.

Send mail from my subdomain address:

After the migration, subdomain accounts will be merged with regular bMail accounts and become aliases. Users will be able to send and receive emails from either their @berkeley.edu address or their @eecs.berkeley.edu subdomain address.

Below, on the same page, where it says "When replying to a message" you have the option of keeping the subdomain as the default 'reply as' address, or changing it to reply from the same address the message was sent to.

Set a vacation message:

Open Settings (in the gear icon) and, in the General tab, scroll down within
the menu until the "Vacation Responder" menu options come into view (near the
bottom of the screen). Click within the message and subject boxes to create your response. Once the message has been written, the beginning and end date for the message can be set via the "First day" and "Ends" fields. When you're done, click the "Vacation responder on" button .

Set up filters:

Check my Spam filter:

Select the "More" option on the left-hand side below the Inbox column. Select the label named "Spam." Check the checkboxes of mail messages that are not spam and then select the 'Not spam' button. This should move the mail back to your "Inbox" label.

Show hidden folders (like Spam, Trash, etc.)

Click "More" at the bottom of the Inbox column. To un-hide a folder, drag it up above the "Less" line. You can also go to Settings, Labels, and set the Spam folder to only show when there are unread messages.

Receive mail I've sent to a mail list

If you are on a mail list and send mail to that list, you will not receive a
copy in your Inbox, so you cannot confirm that the message went to the list.
You need to set up a filter do this:

from: you@eecs.berkey.edu
to: nameoflist@eecs.berkeley.edu
Do this (checkbox): Never send it to Spam

Insert a bCal calendar invitation into a mail message

Click compose. Hover over the plus sign at the bottom of the compose window
and select the last icon "Insert invitation." This will bring up a dialog box
with references to your bCal calendar.

Undo Send

Go to Settings, Labs, and enable the Undo Send lab. Save changes at the bottom
of the Labs page. For a few seconds after you've sent a message, a dialog box will appear asking if you'd like to undo sending the message. If you do nothing, your message will be sent and the dialog box will disappear.
You can set the amount of time you're given to undo sent messages in your general settings.

Undo last action

If you have just deleted a message, added a label, archived a folder,
or did something inadvertent, you can undo your last action by looking
for the Undo link
in the yellow box that appears at the top of the window under the search box.

Put colored tags on messages:

Print out an email message

The printer icon is located above the right hand side reply arrow.
If you want to suppress the email addresses in the header, you
can forward it to yourself before you print, and delete the citation lines.

Find someone in the department who doesn't appear in the auto-fill

If you start typing an address in the To: field, the Berkeley
Campus Directory (including EECS addresses) will be accessed.
Since only the first
5-6 entries in the directory that match the letters you've typed
will be listed, there's a chance that the person whom you would
like to mail will not appear. If this happens, you can click
"Contacts" in the black bar at the top of the window and search
for them there, where there are no limitations on the number of results.
Once you have sent mail to someone, they
will be saved in your contacts so it should be easier to find them again.

Do a mail merge:

There isn't a simple or standard way to do this in bMail as of May 2013.